As Six Go to Court, Police Face Questions on Rape

Police and protesters clash in New Delhi following the gang-rape of a 23-year-old woman who died Saturday, Dec. 23.

India’s police have come under fire in the wake of the gang-rape of a 23-year-old New Delhi student who died Saturday, sparking a debate about law-enforcement reforms.

Women’s activists say police often try to dissuade rape victims from registering cases, and sometimes steer them to marry their rapists.

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“They usually think that the girl must be having an affair with the boy,” says Vandana Sharma, president of Nari Raksha Samiti, a non-profit organization in Delhi that works on women’s issues. Ms. Sharma said India’s police needs more female recruits, with one woman officer stationed at every station to make it easier for women to file rape complaints.

In late December, an 18-year-old woman, who was allegedly gang-raped in the Patiala district of the north Indian state of Punjab, committed suicide after the local police were slow to register her complaint, according to Indian news reports. The woman named the rapists in her suicide note and said that the police repeatedly called her in to ask “uncomfortable” questions, according to reports.

One police officer has been disciplined in connection with this case, said Patiala’s Superintendent of Crime Jaipal Singh on Wednesday. He declined to give further details.

India’s police force defends its performance combating rape, pointing to the swift arrest of six people alleged to have gang-raped the student who died on Saturday. “In 17 hours, the case was worked out,” says Rajan Bhagat, a spokesman for Delhi’s police force.

But Mr. Bhagat acknowledged police need to be more sensitive to women’s issues. “We shouldn’t have cases of women complainants being treated insolently,” he said. Senior police officers, he added, have been told that expectations have increased. “The commissioner has issued strict instructions to all the station house officers of police stations to take immediate action in all complaints irrespective of jurisdictions, which can be sorted out later.”

The six men who allegedly gang-raped the New Delhi student for an hour on a moving bus on Dec. 16 are set to appear in court to be charged by a Delhi court on Thursday. Police say they are seeking charges of murder, which carries the death penalty.

Activists, though, say the New Delhi case is unusual because of the amount of media attention it has generated, pressuring the police to act quickly. They point to thousands of other cases that either are not registered by police or get stuck in India’s legal system.

During 2011, only 15% of the over 95,000 pending rape cases made it to court, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Reported incidences of rape increased to 24,206 in 2011, up 25.1% from 2006, the bureau’s statistics show.

Some activists say the police don’t have enough well-trained officers to adequately deal with the number of potential rape cases.

An average policeman in India covers around 1,000 people, three times the global average, according to 2009 data from Human Rights Watch. In general, Indian policemen don’t have fixed working hours, sometimes working 12 to 18 hours at a stretch, and still get paid a pittance.

For instance, a head constable with five to seven years of experience, earns a monthly salary of around 20,000 rupees ($367) – about what a fresh recruit in India’s information-technology industry would take home.

Activists also are calling for better training to enable police to deal more effectively with cases of violence against women. Instead of questioning a woman’s character or her dress when an incident takes place, the police should be required to seriously investigate the charges, says Sunita Thakur, a consultant at non-profit Jagori, which works on domestic abuse cases.

Ms. Thakur says police officers who don’t wrap up such cases within a specified period of time should be punished to set an example.

She adds there’s also a need for a change in India’s criminal law to recognize rape by a husband, which she says comprises a majority of domestic violence cases but is not covered in the current penal code.

Shefali Anand/The Wall Street Journal

Picture of Hauz Khas Police colony, Delhi, Jan. 2.

Some say the police could make better use of their officers, many of whom regularly are deployed to escort politicians and other VIPs.

This problem is particularly grave in India’s capital, where instead of policing, many officers are tied up providing security to ministers and visiting officials to the city. Mr. Bhagat said that around 10% of Delhi’s police force is typically covering VIPs on an average day, but some local media suggests the number is as high as 25%.

The current state of India’s police force can be seen at a police housing complex in the Hauz Khas neighborhood of south Delhi. Here, many of the four-story apartments have broken windows and walls with peeling paint.

A head constable at the colony, who didn’t want to be named, said that he earned around 32,000 per month ($587), after nearly 30 years of service. He moved to the Hauz Khas complex two years ago to live in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and three children. The constable said he had installed metal grills in place of a missing window pane to protect the apartment from potential theft.

Azad Kaur, the 64-year-old mother of a sub-inspector who also lives in the complex, said government authorities didn’t do anything to improve their living conditions. On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Kaur was on her way to complain about a gutter that had been blocked for nearly two months.

In addition to poor living conditions, some policemen note that the job itself has little to offer. The head constable said he hadn’t been promoted since 1996, leaving him with little motivation to excel at work.

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